If you’re an author who is hoping to be published by a Big Five publisher (Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Hachette, and HarperCollins) or by one of the excellent independent presses that abound, you’ll need a literary agent. Beyond whatever editorial guidance your agent may offer you, they will know what editors to submit to and the ins and outs of negotiating a deal. An agent will also be able to advocate for you along the many steps of publishing a book. Okay, fine, Amy, you might be saying. Sure. I need an agent. But when do I start? Where do I start? There are so many of you! You all ask for different things. How can I tell who is the right match for me and my book—and my future books? I hope the discussion that follows can answer some of those questions and offer further resources that may help along the way.
If you are working on short stories or essays (not yet anything formed into a collection), you’re off the hook here. You don’t need an agent yet. And if you’re a poet, you probably don’t need an agent at all; poets typically navigate the smaller and more specialized world of poetry publishers without one. However, if you have a full-length, completed book project and work in prose, it’s time to start thinking about the Great Agent Search.
As agents, we know that a book is never truly finished. There’s always something else you could tweak. But in terms of getting ready to approach agents, think of it this way: If your book went to print tomorrow, would you be happy with where it stands? If the answer is no—if you suspect there is something large or fundamental that needs to change with your project—then you should hold off. Ask critique partners or beta readers for feedback. Give your book to someone who does not have an emotional connection to you for a cold read. If it’s within your means and if you feel really stuck or have exhausted other options for feedback, consider a developmental editor: a freelancer with editing expertise who can offer you an informed, unbiased take. (This is not a requirement, to be clear; many of the clients I’ve signed did not hire an outside editor before they queried.)
Agents want to read the most finished, polished draft you have to offer us. There are a couple of cold, hard reasons for this that have nothing to do with art and a lot to do with business. First, we don’t get paid until you get paid—i.e., until we sell your book to a publisher and that signing payment comes in. If we need to do six to nine months of editorial work on a project, that’s six months of free (and often joyful!) work we’re doing, but we’re not earning any money for that—and we have mortgages and rents to pay, groceries to buy, etcetera. (Every now and then we do take on projects that need a bigger editorial lift, because we fall so in love with them that we can’t help ourselves. But those are the exception, not the rule.) Second, increasingly editors are being asked to do more things in-house that aren’t editing; they are the touch point for just about every department that works on your book. The feeling among agents of late is that we need to be sending projects that we believe could go to print tomorrow, which trickles down to how we evaluate projects at the query stage.
If you’re freaking out at this point, please don’t—the majority of my clients have all come from the proverbial “slush pile”—that is, unsolicited queries from people I don’t know. But you do want to put your best foot forward; once an agent passes, unless you do substantial revisions to your project, you cannot really go back to them. The subreddit /PubTips can be a gold mine of information about queries, querying, and the publishing process in general, including about these nuances.
Once you believe that your book is in the best shape possible, it’s time to start the agent hunt. Your first stop should be Google for the most data possible. You can prune your list later, but for now you need names. If writing down every single agent who appeals to you seems overwhelming, try compiling a list of agencies. Google searches like “top literary agencies in X category” or “literary agents seeking debuts” can be helpful to start your list. Then you can winnow that list down to who at each agency you want to query. This is also a good strategy because most agencies will ask you to query only one agent at the agency at a time. (We do encourage simultaneous submission to other agencies though.)
Even a search through an agency’s social media can be helpful—if you see the agency posting about books that catch your interest, jot down the name for further investigation. When looking at online lists of top agents on blogs or other advice forums, you will still need to do your own research/due diligence because these lists compiled by third parties may be out of date. Agents may have moved agencies, changed interests, or updated what’s on their manuscript wish lists. Always check against the agency website and what’s stated there; that should be the most up-to-date, accurate information you’re going to find on that agent.
If you’re ready to get agent-specific, you might try a paid subscription to Publishers Marketplace to browse the “Latest Deals” section to gather names. Poets & Writers offers a free literary agents database and Query Tracker, which many agents use to accept submissions, also has a fairly robust database with information about an agent’s typical response time, reply rate, and feedback. Manuscript Wish List remains an excellent resource for getting granular about the kinds of books an agent is seeking.
You might also have a look at the acknowledgments section of books you love or books you think appeal to an audience similar to yours and see who represented those books. If you are part of an MFA or a PhD program, or regularly attend writers conferences or workshops, you may even get one-on-one time with literary agents who are invited to these events, which is another great way to start building out a list of agents to query.
Now that you have a giant list of agents and agencies, it’s time to start paring it down. Querying a mix of experienced agents and more junior agents can be fruitful—more senior agents will have deeper relationships with editors and more experience, but the bar might be significantly higher for them to take on a project, and they might have less time to dig into an edit. Junior agents will be hungry to build a list and will likely have more time to edit. If they have good mentorship and are at a reputable agency, they will have resources to turn to with questions (and we all start somewhere; I remember very clearly being at this stage and hoping authors would take a chance on me). For any agent, I would make sure they are with a reputable agency and overall have a good reputation themselves; Reddit’s /PubTips and Writer Beware can be good places to do this research. What publishing experience are these agents bringing to the table? What does their sales track record (or the agency’s track record) look like? (Publishers Marketplace, available by subscription for $30 per month, or $15 for a 24-hour Quick Pass, is a great place to quickly view these sales.)
Of course, you also want to query someone who is looking for a project like yours and who has experience selling in that space. I caution you to not get too in the weeds on genre/subgenres when picking an agent to query though. If you’re writing a speculative psychological thriller, for example, I’d target agents who are asking for psychological thrillers and who are open to a speculative (or maybe even sci-fi/fantasy) element, unless they specifically say they want it to be grounded (meaning everything is set in our world). Similarly, if an agent says they’re looking for “upmarket and literary fiction,” and you can’t figure out which of those buckets your book lands in, it’s probably a safe bet to query them. Remember that some luck (in addition to all your hard work) is crucial to the agent search too. All you can do is your best.
A lot of the publishing process is going to be out of your hands. Ceding some control is the trade-off for having a book traditionally published. Ideally, you will pick an agent who will treat you as a partner in the process and who will explain over the course of publishing your book what is happening and why. But you can set yourself up for peace of mind, and practice for the rigors of being published, right from the beginning: Be diligent about the factors you can control—writing an excellent book, putting together a strong query package, being thoughtful about who you query—send those queries, light a candle, accept that those queries are now out of your hands, and then go get to work on that next book. Godspeed!
Amy Bishop-Wycisk is a literary agent at Trellis Literary Management.
Thumbnail credit: Davey King